March 2017 Updates
Hello, everyone!
We’ve just gotten back from a trip to Coahoma County which was focused around getting feedback from youth, partners, and collaborators as we move forward with development of the space. In particular, we’re excited to tell you about our collaboration with a team from MassArt and Olin College, sponsored by Autodesk. They’re in a class called Making Music, where they’re working with us as consultants to design curriculum for youth in Coahoma County around building low-cost stringed instruments such as guitars from scratch. You can read more about this in the upcoming Curriculum section! Here are some updates on the project as a whole:
Bus Campaign
We are excited to launch our bus campaign to our hands on a bus that we can begin retrofitting. By tapping into our networks, we hope to be connected with a person who is wants to donate a bus or sell one at a low price. We made a fun campaign video, which you can view here.
Branding
We have been working with youth and community partners to solidify a name and branding scheme for the bus. During our January trip, we did an ideation session for our name with youth at Clarksdale High JROTC, and since then we synthesized their ideas into a couple names and logos that we got feedback on during our trip last week. Now we’re working to compile that feedback and getting help to decide on a name soon! Some high contenders include “The Boom Bus” and “Inspireworks”, but we’ll see what happens.
Additionally, we have been working to develop a website draft, that can be used to help explain the project to funders and new community partners. A beta version is live at https://mobileeducation.wixsite.com/coahoma; please let us know if you have feedback. Feel free to share this website with people that you think would be interested!
Curriculum
We pitched the idea of having a curriculum around making guitars to various youth, partners, and collaborators and we got a lot of excitement so we are deciding to move forward with this plan. We are partnering up with Making Music, a MassArt + Olin + Autodesk class, and we have two teams working in that classes to help us further develop the curriculum.
We also did a small test pilot with youth at Spring Initiative where we had them build a bass guitar from an existing kit. Everyone had a hand in helping drill, assemble, and solder, and it was super exciting when we turned on the amp, strummed it, and it actually sounded a note!
Massachusetts
After our first semester of partnering with the Menino Center last semester, we decided to continue on with this relationship. We talked to the director, Donna Parker about exactly what that partnership would look like for this semester, and we’re really excited to announce that we’ll be working on space design with their older youth! We are collaborating with a group of teenagers to redesign their computer lab space to be better suited for the activities and for the youth and educators who occupy it. Through this process, we hope to facilitate an experience in co-design that will be both valuable to the youth and to us. Because we hope to be co-designing the space inside the bus, we will be documenting and getting feedback on this process so that we can apply the insights once we have a bus! Additionally, working on this project will give us the chance to work more consistently alongside youth in the target age range for our space (14-18), from which we can gain insight into how to create a program that it engaging and useful for them.
If you have any ideas or feedback you want to share on where we are, please let us know! Also, if you would like to be more involved in any of the items mentioned above, we would be very happy to have your input and participation.We’re hoping to make another trip to Coahoma County this April during the Juke Joint festival, and we’re looking forward to connecting with more people then!
Your friends,
Aditi, Alisha, Anne, Cecelia, Irene, Jiaying, Kofi, and Amon
